Originally Posted by
mdarnton
John Shiu is trying to set you right, but Ian's having none of it. :-)
I think you're getting confused here. The camera Ian has shown is probably not relevant to your situation--it's a relatively rare model, the Commercial view. At this point, your camera is missing a fundamental piece of the original camera that is NOT the extension rail. This is the bed of the camera, attached by the hinge that is hanging in your photo. Whether you can then get an extension rail depends on which of the two possible missing beds you find-- one takes the extension Ian has illustrated, the other model stops with the bed, as in the illustration of the grey camera. However you won't be able to change a Universal into a Commercial by a different bed, because the bellows lengths are different.
About 1/4 of the way in from the left on the gray camera you can see the hinge, and the piece in front of it that you don't have, which I again stress is NOT the extension.
Essentially, you bought half a camera, and the missing half, which is NOT the extension rail, will most likely be impossible to find. If you find the bed from a Universal view, which is the grey camera, it will not accept a extension rail. If you get a Commercial view rail, it will accept the extension. The difference between the Universal and the Commercial is not the color: it's the fitting on the front of the bed you don't have, for the extension on the Commercial. The color is insignificant.
And the length of the bellows is different between the two, I will repeat: you will not be able to use the extension rail even if you find a Commercial view bed, unless your camera has the Commercial view bellows, which is about 10 inches longer than the 26" bellows of the Universal view. I'm betting you have the Universal, with the 26mm bellows, not the Commercial, but that should be easy to measure by stretching the bellows out and measuring.
At any rate, before you start thinking about extensions you need to find a bed.
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